India Visa Application
This morning I started filling in the online application for my India visa. I’m applying for a 3 month tourist visa which currently costs £30 plus a service charge of £8.66 and the cost of special delivery to and from the application centre. The High Commission of India has outsourced its visa application handling to VFS, it is VFS who add the service charge. Anyway, I started filling in the form but then reached a section requiring an address in India. My plan was to find accommodation on arrival so I do not have an address which I can put here at the moment. I don’t want to risk submitting the application without the address only for it to be rejected (and costing me) so I’ve fired off an email to VFS to advise on what I should do. If they say that I need to provide an address then I will make a hostel booking using Hostel World, paying only a small deposit, and cancel the booking at a later date. Hopefully VFS won’t take too long to get back to me.
Update: I received confirmation from VFS that the address can be for a hostel that I intend to stay at and I don’t actually need to have a reservation as it won’t be checked. As I continued with the form I was unable to proceed due to the arrival and departure dates. It turns out that the visa will be valid for 6 months from date of approval and unlike other visas this doesn’t mean you need to enter before the end of this period but can leave after this (lots of others have a visa length as well as an expiration), with a India visa you need to arrive and depart with the specified period. My flight out of India is on October 23rd so I will need to wait until April 23rd before continuing with the application.
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Using a hostel address is the way to go. Everyone does it, so should be no problem.
My US J-1 Visa was like this too, you just had to give an address of where you ‘intend’ to stay. Pretty pointless really.